4 Strategies to Keep Your Customers Coming Back

Keeping customer’s happy and coming back is one of the more challenging aspects of business growth and success. It’s a lot more beneficial and lucrative to your business to keep clients coming back and let them grow with you, than having to build new business relationships. You want your customers to stay loyal, keep you as their preferred vendor, and stay happy with your services. Let’s take a look at 4 strategies that will keep customers coming back and stay loyal to your business relationship.

1. First Impression Goes a Long Way

For any new customer relationship, first impressions are everything. It’s important to make the experience as seamless as possible and share all the knowledge needed to begin an efficient relationship. Does your client need certain products as soon as possible? What are their buying patterns? Who are the decision-makers? What is the preferred method for opening an account, and who should they expect to hear from on a follow up? Are they familiar with your internal ordering system process? All of these questions are important to address when signing on a new client and being able to deliver results in a quick and efficient manner.

2. Extend the Customer Philosophy to Your Entire Organization

As an organization, internally the company strategies and makes changes to enhance the customer experience. It’s important to develop processes internally, so the departments involved can understand and develop best practices to serve customer services management. By nature, a company would involve all departments that serve the customer (i.e. Sales, Customer Service, A/P) etc. A company should involve the entire organization in any changes to the customer experience and build that into the value proposition and corporate mission.

Training is an important aspect of change to enhance the customer experience. Possibly as a company you changed your ordering system from paper to online or you allow payment straight from your company website. All employees that interface with customers should be trained on any new systems involved. It the company is well-versed and prepared to serve the customer experience, customer’s will be happier and the communication with all parties will be more fluent.

3. Customer Complaints? More Resolution-Less Problems

It’s the dreaded customer complaint. It’s important for companies to educate their employees on excellent customer service to identify issues and complaints before they escalate. Take ownership as needed, and take the necessary steps properly prepare your workforce.

With any steps taken, feedback from the customer experience on how complaints are handled is a good initiative to make changes internally which can help negate future issues. One solution does not fit all in terms of a complaint or problem, but identifying the origin and changing processes as needed will help the organization serve it’s customer better for the future.

4, Improve Your Communications

A strong process is nothing without equally strong communications. Being in the client-service role, employees should make it a goal for each client that needs are being met and they feel valued. As communications are segmented to customers through different channels (email marketing, website or through sales/customer service departments), the entire organization should be versed on any changes or updates that are sent out to clients.

With looking at the cost of changing the strategies for customer experience, the investment is minimal. Putting these steps into effect, will create a positive customer experience and keep customers loyal and committed. In turn, the customer service management program will be successful, and the company will see an increased ROI and be able to focus on new revenue opportunities.